• Dungeons as networks

    A Melan diagram is a way to simplify a dungeon design to its bare topology to show if it is Jaquaysed (i.e., not linear or branching but with loops that allow meaningful choices). In the comments to a Justin Alexander post on Melan diagrams, there’s a discussion of whether explicitly invoking graph theory adds anything to dungeon design/analysis or only confuses the issue with jargon. I don’t know about pure graph theory, but you can definitely learn about dungeons through social network analysis (SNA), which is a major offshoot of graph theory.

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  • Black Friday 2023 recs

    While waiting for Questing Beast’s sales guide to drop, I realized that I have a pretty extensive collection myself and could flag some things I recommend that are on sale. I have used all my recommendations at the table, except for Crypts & Things, which I read closely.

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  • Coding hex flowers in R

    Goblin’s Henchman has done a lot of work on hex flowers, culminating in The Hex Flower Cookbook. The basic idea is to have a random table, but one with memory such that the last result affects the next. A “hex flower” is a hex of hexes, where the big hex is three small hexes to a face, resulting in 19 hexes in the flower. You roll 2d6, which tells you which way to move from the current hex. As you’d expect from 2d6, some values are more likely than others and so the tendency is to move down and to the left. Mostly the map rolls over the edge (like PacMan) but a few paths are blocked.

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  • Review: Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

    I recently read and enjoyed Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground (hereafter MAHG) but it wasn’t what I expected. I was expecting something comparable to Art & Arcana but not limited to just D&D. There are two differences between Art & Arcana and MAHG. The obvious but less important one is that MAHG has more text and less pictures. This is ironic given that the book grew out of Horvath’s Instagram feed.

    The less obvious but more important difference is that Art & Arcana is ultimately a work of history written (in part) by an academic historian. In contrast, despite being published by MIT Press, MAHG is not a work of academic scholarship, but a collector showing off his stuff. Horvath’s tone is a bit like travel writing, with a heavy emphasis on the subjective experience. This is especially pronounced in his review of Old School Essentials, which reads like the grognard equivalent to asking Proust about a cookie.

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  • Pidgins and Creoles

    Last week, The Alexandrian had a post on Pidgins. The upshot is very similar to the language rules in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is that the more similar two languages are, the more likely characters can find enough common vocabulary to crudely communicate. For instance, when I visited Norway, I had the sense that if I had retained any of the German I took in college, that I’d have been able to understand a bit more Norsk than I got from speaking English, which in turn gave me more advantage than if I had spoken Korean or Quechua or Hebrew.

    “Let’s see how much our language overlaps” is one way you can get a contact language and probably describes the origins of Sabir (“lingua franca”). However, a “pidgin” properly is when diverse groups all encounter each other (typically as slaves or contract plantation workers) and borrow vocabulary from the socially dominant group’s language to form a new proto-language. Notably, contact languages and pidgins lack much in the way of grammar so it’s hard to distinguish orc slays elf from elf slays orc. In the second generation, a pidgin will spontaneously develop a grammar and linguists call this a creole, though the speakers themselves may continue to call it “pidgin.”

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  • Leader types

    One of the classic D&D tropes is that a gang of humanoids often includes “a leader type.” In old editions, this humanoid foreman gets a one-line description as “fights as [humanoid one increment higher by hit dice]” and in 5e they get their own page in Leomund’s Condominium of Antagonists. Back on Earth, it is true that basically all cultures have some level of hierarchy, with some people, almost always male, having more power and influence than others.* However the details of what human leader types look like varies a lot and anthropologists distinguish between various leader types in ways that can be subtle, but imply very different social structures.

    One of the classic articulations of the distinction is in Sahlins’s article “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia.” In both Polynesia (e.g., Hawaii and Tahiti) and Melanesia (e.g., New Guinea and Fiji), there are traditionally men with particularly great influence in a community, but the nature of influence varies. Polynesians have chiefs or kings in a way that is very familiar cross-culturally. The status is not earned but one of noble blood that marks out the nobility as distinctive but vulnerable to pollution. Melanesians have “big men,” a status that is achieved through giving and receiving gifts. As such, gift exchange scholars are obsessed with big men and their associated practices of potlatch (competitive feasting).

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  • objet trouve one-page dungeon

    In late November 2001, The Times of London published a remarkably, ahem, speculative illustration of where Bin Laden might be hiding. I only had to change a couple of the captions to make a passable dungeon. At first glance it seems linear but the ventilation ducts and multiple entrances effectively Jaquays the dungeon. Stupid journalism but awesome adventure.

  • Sew your zines

    I recently got a bookbinding kit on Amazon for $7 as I got very tired of choosing between reading zines on my tablet or paying $10 for the zine + $5 for shipping. I found it works well for anything up to about 100 pages. I don’t expect to buy a printed zine again unless a) I’m at a con/FLGS so no shipping, b) there’s interior color artwork, or c) it’s really long. So I will definitely be getting Knock #4 in print. For everything else, I’m paying $3-$5 for the PDF then spending ten minutes to print and bind it myself.

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  • Oh, the Humanity

    One of the basic design issues with D&D is that demihumans get to do stuff, most notably see in the dark, that humans can’t. Given this, why would you ever play a human? This is a problem as a party that is mostly non-humans feels very high fantasy or even D&D eating its own tail, and not the grounded low fantasy of Appendix N sword and sorcery. It is one of many cases where too much magic makes the world feel less magical. A human trades the memory of her first love to an elf for a ray of moonlight is magical. A tiefling, a dragonborn, and a gnome walk into a dungeon is the aftermath of a sale at Spirit of Halloween.

    So, how can games keep this in check and ensure they have human PCs. Or more to the point, what rules can you have around race (or as they now call it, kinship, ancestry, or species) with this aim?

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  • Chesterton’s d20

    AD&D as Crunchy OD&D Case Law

    If you read Peterson’s Game Wizards you see one of Arneson’s many failed projects was an index for D&D. This was necessary because within a few years finding rules spread across the white box and the three supplements was difficult and confusing. Unfortunately for Arneson, the publication of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rendered the effort both superfluous and obsolete as soon it was published. A big part of what AD&D did was take all the stuff Arneson indexed and put it in a coherently organized fashion. Well, coherently organized relative to original D&D and its supplements if not relative to such later revisions of AD&D as AD&D 2e, OSRIC, or Hyperborea. Of course, AD&D was more than reorganization but also included a lot of fiddly bits, which is why Swords & Wizardry: Complete (retroclone of OD&D + supplements) and OSRIC (retroclone of AD&D) are similar but different games.

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